Making food safer with viruses

Fighting fire with fire. [Link]

Over the years, Satzow has adopted a variety of antimicrobial products and processes to try and close that window. In 2011, he added a new weapon to his bacteria-fighting arsenal, a spray that contains billions of virus particles called bacteriophages—“phages” for short—which target and destroy bacteria, but not human or animal cells. “We try to be on the cutting edge of everything,” Satzow says. So now each package of chorizo or smoky maple links that rolls down the smokehouse’s spotless conveyor belt gets a squirt of a bacteriophage product called Listex before being sealed.

Inside that liquid are billions of phages that bind to bacteria and inject their genetic material. These molecular instructions direct the cells to make more phages that produce an enzyme that “breaks open the cell wall from the inside out,” says Olivia McAuliffe, a senior researcher at the Teagasc Food Research Centre in Ireland. The bacterium bursts and dies, and the phages escape and infect other bacteria.

Doctors began using phages to treat bacterial infections nearly a century ago, but the idea that phages could protect against food-borne pathogens came about in the past decade. “The food industry isn’t known for its quick adaptation for new innovations,” says Dirk DeMeester, director of business development for Micreos Food Safety, the Dutch company that developed Listex. Yet the idea seems to be slowly gaining traction. DeMeester declined to provide sales figures, but he hinted that business is booming. “Our growth is exponential,” he says. “People are starting to understand that it’s more than just a good idea. It’s going to be an industry standard.”